Night Sweats, and Menggodam
Jan. 10, 2026
CAMP Studio
Saturday, 6 to 8 pm.
A conversation with scholar Irina Aristarkhova and theorist/ curator Gunalan Nadarajan about their recent projects.
Irina presents ideas from an upcoming co-authored book on cyberfeminism, Night Sweats: Cyberfeminist Practices, out this year.
Guna will speak about a recent exhibition series across South East Asia, the first of which is named Menggodam.
Guna:
The Malay word menggodam is multivalent, with a rich range of uses including hacking, disruption, untoward (ab)use, creative remaking and even piracy. In this exhibition, we present menggodam as the cultural ingenuity of reprogramming to execute one’s own program. Such strategies are found in different guises in Asia – in shanzai and chabuduo in China, in Japanese devices called chindogu; related to jugaad in India, diskarte in the Philippines and akalakalaan in Indonesia. Such practices have developed in relation to a wider contestation over making in the last half century – who makes and how one makes and how that which is made is valued. The exhibition locates itself anew in this milieu of making, bringing together artists from the region to speculate on the radical potential of cultural practices like menggodam to unsettle our relationship to the ‘technological’.
Irina: I offer a critique of tactical media art movement from a cyberfeminist perspective and its most recent reincarnation in Hyla Willis’s durational performance practice that challenges typographical "pain points" and “consent theatre” of Terms and Conditions. These are part of my newest book Night Sweats: Cyberfeminist Practices, co-authored with Hyla Willis, Nat Mengist, and Faith Wilding. The overall motto of the book is “we will save ourselves,” with examples taken from critical and revisionist histories of alchemy, the automation of writing systems, and reproductive mutual aid.
Followed by a conversation of overlaps and divergences, with them, see you there. RSVP required, here
